Can An Uptick In M&A Activity Affect The African Tech Ecosystem?

In the myriad of conversations about African tech, mergers and acquisitions aren’t usually leading topics – and understandably so too. The ecosystem is still in its early stages, startups aren’t attractive value-wise as standalone entities and funding is still very small compared to other markets (African tech startups raised $560 million in 2017 compared to the $84.2 billion raised in the US).

Still, there is way more M&A activity than we tend to realise. In Nigeria, micro-discussion site, Yarnable, was acquired by MobiQube and Le Proghrammeen as early as 2011. In South Africa, acquisitions were already happening as early as 1999 with VeriSign’s $575 million acquisition of certificate authority firm, Thawte. In more recent times, Ethiopian developer marketplace startup Gebeya acquired developer training startup Coders4Africa while Nigeria’s Zinox Technologies acquired Nigerian ecommerce startup Konga. The list goes on.

What M&A looks like in Africa

However, there are some important trends to note with African M&A deals. Firstly, they seem to be driven largely by value-adds acquirers can bring on top of their existing business. A great example of this is Nigerian ecommerce startup Konga’s acquisition of mobile banking startup Zinternet in 2015 to build Click here to read entire article